Today at the grocery store a sweet older lady approached me and asked if I knew anything about computers. I said yes I do, and she produced a mouse saying that her son set up Linux mint for her and she was wondering if the mouse was compatible. It needed kernel version 2.6 or newer so I said that the mouse should work, guessing mint itself was probably newer than that kernel. Happy with my answer, we chatted a little, then she thanked me and left.
It was a nice experience, so I thought I should share!
I don’t have any reason to not trust OP, but the likelihood of this conversation happening at ALL seems incredibly unlikely. Never mind that it is described as successful.
If true, this is amazing.
I mean, it could be possible that the box of the mouse said something like kernel 2.6+. Considering that is older than 2011, OP’s answer was absolutely spot on.
Why is this sweet old lady carrying a mouse around the grocery store asking about decades old kernel versions lol
Put this way… 😂
Before I decide whether this story is real I need to know what OP looks like that some lady singled him out in public to ask a Linux related question. OP, do you wear a wizard hat in public? Were you buying Doritos and Mountain Dew? I must know.
A robe and wizard hat.
I imagine OP had a neckbeard, belt and suspenders and was carrying a copy of Gödel-Escher-Bach.
Old lady uses Linux … what’s your excuse?
muh vibeo ganes
With the exception of a handful of titles, this is a quickly evaporating problem, due to Valve pouring millions of dollars into the development of the Steam Deck (motivated by wanting to separate themselves from being dependent on their computer Xbox/Microsoft).
Valve recently passed 11,000 playable or verified titles for the Deck, and since the Deck is Linux, that means 11,000 playable games in Linux (with priority on the most played games)
As someone who regularly games on a Deck and occasionally uses Nobara on a desktop, it definitely shows, yeah. Incredible how far we’ve come in that regard.
I do still stick with Windows on desktop 90% of the time because unfortunately it seems some of the more advanced NVIDIA features I use very often like DLDSR are unlikely to ever make their way to the Linux drivers, but that’s a petty me problem.
I definitely agree that for the vast majority of users it’s a pretty good experience nowadays unless one can’t make do without the handful of games with unsupported anticheat and such.
Do most newer fighting games work on Linux? I usually play multiplayer games and the anti cheats usually don’t work on Linux, but I’m not sure how modern fighting games are set up.
I play Strive, SF6 and BBCF fine on my desktop linux PC. Had some technical problems with sf6 when I had a Nvidia gpu, but it wasn’t related to anti cheat. Works great with AMD.
Thanks for the info! Would you know if Tekken works? Or how to find out?
i worked in sales long enough to know that No, No sweet older lady ever spoke those words to you “setup on linux mint” and include the capacity for understanding hardware compliances? did everyone in the store clap too? but…it would be a nice fantasy ngl
Some sweet older ladies used to work for the NSA like my grandma, and she only had me get rid of her Linux mint partition because she wasn’t using it much
I did once have a very not technical mate ask for some help with their laptop, and it was randomly running edubuntu? I was like yeah no worries I got this but why TF are you running linux, they didn’t even really understand, apparently some random friend had set them up with it because they didn’t want to pay for windows lol.
edubuntu
An education focused Ubuntu distro, weird. Also getting into Linux because it’s free is a great reason to get into Linux, if you get comfortable with it now it can help you in many STEM careers in addition to your own needs and proposes.
This is both very likely true while also being the peak male Lemmy user fantasy that will confuse future alien archaeologists the most. Thanks for sharing!
Reminds of Penthouse Forum stories.
I worked retail in electronics for quite a while and all the linux people I encountered were turbonerds for the most part. Thankfully I think that is changing. I imagine this lady had one of her family members set her up of course.
Hey, thank you again, OP.
I’ll take “Stories That Didn’t Happen” for 500, Alex.
Assuming this story is true, Linux is going to be a nightmare for that woman. It’s come a long way, but it’s still not as dead simple as it needs to be for non-technical elderly people.
